In this particular case, the toothbrush botnet was thought to have been vulnerable due to its Java-based OS. No particular toothbrush brand was mentioned in the source report. Normally, the toothbrushes would have used their connectivity for tracking and improving user oral hygiene habits, but after a malware infection, these toothbrushes were press-ganged into a botnet.
After almost a year as an invite-only app, Bluesky is now open to the public. Funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is one of the more promising micro-blogging platforms that could provide an alternative to Elon Musk’s X. Before opening to the public, the platform had about 3 million sign-ups. Now that anyone can join, the young platform faces a challenge: How can it meaningfully stand up to Threads’ 130 million monthly active users, or even Mastodon’s 1.8 million?
The Vision Pro, Apple’s new VR and mixed-reality headset, generated a wealth of dystopian images as influencers took the premium device out for a spin in the real world after its launch on Friday. Here are just a few examples: YouTubers Isaac Mosna and Patrick Tomasso went out for dinner while both wearing the $3,499 goggles; X user Dante wore the headset while in a self-driving Tesla, tapping at the air until the clip cuts to show him parked with police lights flashing in his rear window; a man wore his Vision Pro on the subway to work, which, again, to others looks like gesturing at nothing in the ether; Casey Neistat unsteadily climbed a set of stairs while responding to texts wearing the headset; and YouTuber Victor Abarca even held a dinner party where the guests clinked glasses while looking at each other through pass-through video feeds. In one clip, X user Alex Finn sits in his living room, surrounded by seven virtual screens showing sports and social media, before reaching for a sandwich (another clip, where he’s surrounded by TikTok videos, is even more disorienting).
Browser makers Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, alongside two software consultancies, celebrated a moment of unity and common purpose on Thursday with the announcement of Interop 2024, a project to promote web browser interoperability.
Universal Music Group (UMG), the label representing artists such as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, says that it’ll pull its music from TikTok tomorrow at midnight after failing to reach a deal with the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, over royalties.
It’s all over for Adobe XD. After losing out in its $20bn bid for Figma, the firm is conceding defeat in the UI design arena – for now, at least. In the fallout of a deal that saw the company placed under the microscope of competition authorities in Europe and the US, Bloomberg is reporting that Adobe has confirmed it has “no plans to further invest” in its own UI/UX web design software.
“Designed for experimentation and creativity, ImageFX lets you create images with a simple text prompt, then easily modify them with a new take on prompting using expressive chips,” Google writes in a blog post. “We invested in the safety of training data from the outset,” Google said. “Consistent with our AI principles, we also conducted extensive adversarial testing and red teaming to identify and mitigate potential harmful and problematic content.”
